Happy Are the Hungry (Matthew 5:6)

Manny was born into poverty in Lagos, Nigeria. His family of thirteen shared a two-room cinder block house and, like many poor Nigerian families, survived on less that $2 a day, often enjoying only one daily meal. He lacked many of the luxuries that we take for granted. Like shoes. He walked around barefoot, which set him at risk for a number of diseases.

One day, as he was playing outside, Manny saw something strange. A white man was throwing an orange ball into a net attached to a hoop at the top of a pole. Balls were meant to be kicked into goals, so this new game intrigued him. The white stranger invited him and a few other bystanders to enter a contest: Whoever sunk the most baskets would win a pair of shoes. Manny eagerly participated and won his first pair of shoes.

The white stranger was a missionary from the United States, who transformed Manny’s life with a simple act of kindness. Manny went on to become a basketball star. Scouted by American colleges, he eventually accepted a basketball scholarship to a university in North Dakota. He excelled both in basketball and academics, graduated, got married, and quickly climbed the corporate ladder. He was living the American dream. But he was not content.

Despite his material affluence—or perhaps because of it—the thought of shoeless boys and girls the other side of the world troubled him. Eventually, he quit his lucrative job and formed Samaritan’s Feet, a nonprofit committed to providing ten million pairs of shoes to children around the world.

Justice motivated Manny to act against injustice. Why should millions of children around the world risk disease, which could easily be prevented by a pair of shoes? Why should privileged people in wealthier countries trip over the shoes littering their walk-in closets while children the other side of the world ran around barefoot? He hungered and thirsted to see this injustice rectified.

Derwin Gray uses Manny’s story as an illustration of what Jesus meant by hungering and thirsting after righteousness. Manny was motivated by his Christian faith to see wrongs put right. Manny’s story, I believe, is an example of what it means to hunger and thirst after righteousness. But the story must begin somewhere else, as I hope to show in our consideration of this beatitude.

I want to consider three things in our time in this beatitude:

1. The Counterculture of the Beatitude—“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst”
2. The Character of the Beatitude—“for righteousness”
3. The Consequence of the Beatitude—“for they will be satisfied”

The Counterculture of the Beatitude

Previous studies in this series have highlighted the countercultural nature of the beatitudes, and it is worthwhile observing here again. As we have seen, the beatitudes are not so much, “Do this and you will be blessed” as, “You are blessed if you are characterised by this.” But the things that he describes as sources of blessing are things that we would not expect to evidence blessing.

The beatitude before us is a case in point: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst.” The attitude described here was countercultural in the ancient world and is countercultural today.

“Blessed are …” Eugene Peterson observes that people in the ancient world did not expect to be happy.

By contrast, people today (at least in Western-influenced societies) expect to be happy and we tend to hide any evidence of unhappiness for fear of people looking down on us. We understand “blessed” in a way that the ancients did not, even if our definition of “blessed” is woefully anaemic.

But that doesn’t mean that the beatitude is any less countercultural for us today. If the ancients could not comprehend the idea of happiness, we cannot comprehend how happiness might be linked to hunger and thirst! Jesus pronounces a blessing on those who “hunger and thirst.” Our culture’s idea of “blessedness” is having all our needs fulfilled. When asked how we are doing, we might say something like, “Well, I have food in my stomach, clothes on my back, and a roof over my head, so I’m blessed.” We consider ourselves blessed as long as our basic needs are met. Counterculturally, Jesus pronounces a blessing here on those who hunger and thirst is not satiated. “You are blessed if you are hungry.” “You are blessed if you are thirsty.” That doesn’t sound right.

But, of course, there is a particular character to the hunger and thirst of which Jesus speaks. We must consider the beatitude in its fullness.

The Character of the Beatitude

The blessing in this verse is pronounced upon those who hunger and thirst “for righteousness.” As we define it theologically, “righteousness” has at least four aspects: legal, personal, social, and eschatological.

First, through the person and work of Jesus Christ, God declares Christians legally righteous. By the lawlessness of our sin, we invited the penalty of death. But Jesus Christ, the Son of God, became human, lived a perfect life, died a sacrificial death, and rose victoriously from the grave so that we, by his merit, could be declared righteous in God’s eyes. In theological terms, we call this “imputed” righteousness, which is an act of justification.

Second, God imparts righteousness to those to whom he imputes righteousness. In other words, our righteous standing before God is evidenced by personal righteousness. God transforms those whom he saves so that they begin to long for and live according to his righteous standards. We call this sanctification.

Third, the Christian’s personal righteousness increases in him or her a longing for righteousness in the broader society. The more you grow in personal righteousness the more you long to see righteousness in the society. You become like “righteous lot” whom Peter says was “greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked,” so much so that “as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard” (2 Peter 2:7–8). Critics of Christianity often claim that it is the source of many historic injustices. While this is a claim with which we must wrestle, it is undeniable that Christianity has also been the driving force behind many historic efforts to counter injustice. In Hebrew and in Greek, the words for “justice” and “righteousness” are the same word. It would not be inaccurate to translate this verse as, “Happy are those who hunger and thirst for justice.”

Fourth, there is a promise of eschatological righteousness, when, at Christ’s return, we will be resurrected from our graves and transformed fully into the image of God’s Son. We call this glorification.

As we think about the way in which Jesus used the word “righteousness” in this beatitude, the broader context of the Sermon offers us a great deal of assistance. “Righteousness” is a significant theme in the Sermon. It may not be too great a stretch to suggest that it is the primary theme. The concept of “righteousness” appears at least five times in these chapters.

After this initial reference to longing for righteousness, we next read of opposition to righteousness in 5:10–12—the final beatitude—which envisions Christians being opposed because of their hunger and thirst for righteousness.

The nature of righteousness is disclosed in 5:20–48. Jesus teaches that the righteousness of the blessed must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees (v. 20). He offers six illustrations of what surpassing righteousness looks like. Pharisaic righteousness says, “Don’t murder,” while surpassing righteousness says, “Don’t be unjustly angry” (vv. 21–26). Pharisaic righteousness says, “Don’t commit adultery,” while surpassing righteousness says, “Don’t lust” (vv. 27–30). Pharisaic righteousness says, “Follow protocols when divorcing your wife,” while surpassing righteousness says, “Stay faithful to your marriage vows” (vv. 31–32). Pharisaic righteousness says, “Keep your word if you have uttered an oath,” while surpassing righteousness says, “Be a person of your word” (vv. 33–37). Pharisaic righteousness says, “Make sure that your payback to your enemies is proportionate to how they have wronged you,” while surpassing righteousness says, “Turn the other cheek” (vv. 38–42). Pharisaic righteousness says, “Love your neighbour and hate your enemy,” while surpassing righteousness says, “Love your enemy.”

The bulk of chapter 6 is taken with the opposite of righteousness, which Jesus speaks of in 6:1: “Beware of practising your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.” Jesus defines this attitude of practising righteousness for public recognition as “hypocrisy” (6:2, 5, 16). He offers a series of illustrations in chapter 6 of what this hypocritical righteousness looks like.

He concludes his discussion of righteousness by addressing the source of righteousness (6:33), which is God himself. The righteousness of the blessed is surpassing righteousness because it comes from God himself. It is Christ’s righteousness.

As we consider the various references to “righteousness” in this Sermon, a pattern emerges. The righteousness of the blessed comes from God himself as he imputes alien righteousness to those who, by faith, trust in Christ for salvation. That puts us in the state of being blessed. It also instils in us a hunger for more of Christ’s righteousness—personally and socially. The more we understand Christ’s righteousness, the more we want to see it in our lives and in our world. And the promise is that, one day, at the resurrection, we will be made completely righteous and the hunger will be eternally satisfied and the thirst eternally quenched.

The question that faces us as we live in this world is, do we hunger and thirst for righteousness? Is surpassing righteousness a basic need without which we cannot thrive?

Too often, we fall prey to the hypocrisy of the Pharisees by defining our righteousness in contrast to the world. Cultural Christianity thrives on this sort of thing. Cultural Christians often live the same way as the world does but baptise their hypocrisy in the name of Christianity. They do the same things the world does; they just call it something else. If the world’s children play “Duck, Duck, Goose” at their birthday parties, cultural Christians will play “Disciple, Disciple, Judas.” We would never be like the world in its flagrant disregard of marriage by no-fault divorce, but we will disregard and disrespect our spouse even as we maintain an air of respectability by staying in the marriage. We guard our tongues from the angry vitriol that unbelievers spew against each other while harbouring bitterness and unforgiveness in our hearts. So long as we can feel that we are doing better than our unbelieving neighbour, we tell ourselves that we are hungering and thirsting for righteousness.

That is exactly the attitude that the Pharisees adopted. Outwardly, they were far “better” than the surrounding world, and yet Jesus rebuked them as hypocrites and instructed his people to hunger and thirst for righteousness that surpassed that of the scribes and Pharisees. In other words, stop comparing yourself to others and hunger for the righteousness that comes from a living relationship with God. That is how you know that you are blessed.

The British neurologist Oliver Sacks tells the story of a doctor who had for decades headed a facility that housed and treated dementia patients. When the doctor was himself diagnosed with dementia, he was placed in the same facility that he had, for decades, managed. But because of the familiar surroundings, he, in his advancing dementia, didn’t realise that he was a patient. He thought he was at work. Every morning, he would get out of bed, visit patients in their rooms, read their charts, and dispense medical advice. The medical authorities thought that this did no harm and so tolerated it. One day, the doctor walked into a room, read a chart, and started weeping. He had picked up his own chart and realised in that moment that he was suffering with dementia.

You see, the doctor was terrified precisely because he was a doctor. He read the chart and knew what it meant. Diagnosing and treating other patients was one thing, but when he saw the disease in himself, he was gripped with fear.

It is easy to assess unrighteousness in others with a sense of academic fervour, but Jesus wants us to turn the diagnosis on ourselves and realise that we have so far to go. Yes, Christians have been declared legally righteous by the merit of Christ, but he wants us to long for greater, surpassing righteousness. In fact, the implication is that we will never be truly happy until we do hunger for surpassing righteousness.

The Consequence of the Beatitude

Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness “will be satisfied.” This doesn’t necessarily mean that we will be satisfied to the point of never hungering and thirsting again. It means that we will be satisfied with what God gives us.

If you’ve ever had a craving for a particular type of food, you know the satisfaction of receiving it. My wife had very different cravings during her three pregnancies. During one, the thought of chicken gravy sickened her but she craved roasted vegetables. For months, she could not get enough of roasted vegetables—whether it was a reasonable hour of the day or not. When she had roasted vegetable, she was satisfied—until the next meal.

When we hunger and thirst for Christ’s righteousness, we will be satisfied with what he gives. But, counterintuitively, that satisfaction will cause us to hunger for more because it is so satisfying.

This satisfaction is something that we can find only in Christ. We must seek first his righteousness (6:33), which is imputed to us by faith in his finished work. Until you hunger and thirst for Christ’s righteousness, you will never know satisfaction. You must reckon with sin’s depths and its inability to satisfy and look to Christ and his righteousness alone for satisfaction.

And then you must live life with eyes fixed steadfastly on Christ, longing for more of what only he can offer. That is your only hope of satisfaction in this world and the next.

AMEN